Technology

That’s not a request, it’s an order!

Losing your phone is one thing, it’s probably insured and you’ll either get your phone back or a replacement, great – you have a working phone, but aren’t you forgetting something?

What about the content on your phone?

Your photo’s? Your picture messages? Your diary? Your videos? They’re what make the phone yours aren’t they? It’s not just a loss that will mean you don’t have these but all manner of accidents! I’ve just spent the morning extracting data from a phone that was dropped, and the screen completely died. In the normal course of events I’d plug it in to a computer, get off what I could (photo’s by treating it as as memory card and hope that contacts and text messages would sync to the Motorola or Nokia suite as appropriate).In this case there was some bad, and some good luck!

photo credit: Glen Bowman

First the bad, the phone wasn’t set into sync mode – it just wanted to be treated as a memory card. I knew this was an option in the phone, but with no screen how was I going to turn it on? A stroke of good luck… The phone was a Nokia N85!

What’s so special about it being an N85? The N85 has two slots on top, a USB Sync/Charge and a Video-Out! 1 cable later (and some rearrangement of furniture) the TV is in the office and I’m able to use the TV as a screen for the phone!! It was quite impressive!

I successfully extracted all the data except photo messages, I had to go into each individual photo message and save the image to the memory card then copy that back to the computer.

Now what?

Well we’re not going to lug a TV around to use as a screen are we? I rang up a local phone repair shop and dropped it in just over 2 hours ago. It’s ready for collection already… New LCD and new Lens all fitted… Hurrah!

For reference Swindon Phone Fix on Commercial Road, Swindon did this!

Twitter introduced list functionality a while back, and I’ve used it a bit here and there (mainly so I can find the real life people I know on Twitter amongst the “noise”), but I wanted to start using them a little differently so did some research.

Lists Are Great

I follow well over a thousand people, so if you’re in the midst of that and aren’t in the 25 most recent tweets when I look at my main stream, then unless you’re on a list (a column in my TweetDeck) I’m not going to see what you tweeted! Sorry, but that’s the way it is (of course message me if you think you shold be on one of my lists, I’m @Keiron).

My lists so far have been mainly to make my life easier, local people, real life, a “see-all” for people I find interesting (and I try to limit that one to 20-30 people), a tech one etc. So I can see all of these people’s tweets at once. I have a few private lists too (customers, suppliers etc).

Following a List

You can also follow a list, say for example you wanted to follow all the comedians I follow – that’s easy you just follow this list, and when I update it you get all my recommendations:
http://twitter.com/Keiron/comedians

This functionality means that you can get a moderated list by someone who is an expert in their subject, for example I’ve followed in the past, Will Carling’s list of rugby players, whenever he finds a new one – I see their tweets (without having to go hunting for them, and he mixes in the right circles to know these people!).

I’ve followed one or two lists belonging to other people in the past – but I usually tend to follow a list for a while – work out who’s interesting on the list and then follow those individuals, adding them to a similar list of my own (which other people can follow if they wish!).

Ok, so lists are great – what’s the new thing?

It’s not exactly new, but it’s new to the way I think about lists! After some discussion over the last week and a little experimentation it turns out I might be able to clean up my main twitter stream somewhat (I can hear a lot of you breathing sighs of relief about how good that would be for you!).

You can add users to a list, without following them.

Why is this good? Well, taking one example – I follow a lot of rugby people, they don’t tend to follow me back – probably because as rugby players they aren’t particularly interested in my random tweets about doing the accounts, deciding if Big Brother’s going to be any good, or the latest PHP programming project! So I’m unlikely to get a reciprocal follow from them…

You’ve probably spotted where this is going now…………If it’s somebody I want to read their tweets but are unlikely to follow me back, I’m going to add them to lists rather than follow them that way they’ll appear in a specific niche column in my TweetDeck (or Seismic on my Milestone).

I know what some of you are thinking:

“You need to follow people, follow more people, then follow more people – it’s the only way you’ll get followers yourself!!”

I used to think the same, but I’m coming away from that now, I want people to follow me because they want to, if they don’t want to – that’s fine as well! By unfollowing all those that I’m interested in who don’t follow me and adding them to a list this will clean up my main stream so that in future it is full of people that interest me most of the time (and maybe don’t fit into a niche).

I’ll see how this goes initially, and if it goes well I’ll probably take it one stage further and unfollow people that are on my lists (even if they’re following me), I suspect this may lead to a mass unfollowing of me. But hey if they’re only following me so I’ll follow them back are they actually going to bother to read any of my tweets?

I haven’t quite sussed out the finer details of this yet, but I suspect I’ll have some kind of workflow:

1. Follow a User,
2. If they interest me a lot stay following (and add to list),
   If they interest but are quite niche unfollow them (and add to a list),
   If they make no sense and I simply don’t want to see their tweets them simply unfollow.

That said I’m going to have to put in quite a bit of legwork initially to clean up my initial followers, I’ll probably use friendorfollow.com to do this. Saying that, I started to use it the other day and opened 230 tabs in Firefox (after it had used up over a GB of RAM it settled down!). So I’ll be doing a Father Chistmas:

“Making a list, Checking it Twice… Going to find out who’s naughty or nice”

How do you use twitter lists, is there a way they make your life easier? I’d be interested to hear!

I outsource some work overseas, but I’ve moved away from single contracts and now have someone on a regular long term contract to work with me, but this post isn’t about that, it’s about some of the spam I’ve been getting on this blog recently!

I use both Akismet and WP-SpamFree to keep this blog reasonably clean of spam, but more has been getting through recently (well through to the point where it’s held for moderation). I wanted to tell you about the two most recent (and persistent offenders)

Battery Man

The most recent items are all about batteries and hard drives on my posts about MyXerver and my PINES USB Battery Pack. The spammer merrily went through several posts telling me his iPod Touch was dead and would I help, until he got to my post about spam comments, when his spam comment with links to a battery site simply said:

i konw this is a spam comment..

I almost let that one through it was so funny! But really, if you used a real name (instead of having me believe your name is battery) I’d let you link to your site!

Outsourced Link Building

The second one was quite strange and I’m not entirely sure how much information to give out about it! Let me explain…

The poster systematically went through a lot of posts, using a real name and linking to a UK company (I’m not sure whether to release the name of the company as they were probably unaware of the problem!). To be fair I would have let the comments through if it hadn’t been:
a) so obviously systematic .
b) so many pointless comments like “great post”.

What I found annoying about it was the IP address was in Bangladesh, no problem there we all outsource, but the email address being used was for a UK SEO company – yes, yes I know they’re entitled to outsource as much as the rest of us. But I wonder if their customer knew that spammy comments would be used in their SEO campaign? I somewhat doubt it?

I debated revealing the UK SEO company (and I know a few people on Twitter have asked me to do so at the time I was watching the spammer do this), but I’m not going to for now.. I’ll probably drop them a link to this post and ask for their feedback?

Interestingly, I did a search for links to their client’s site in Google and only two blogs allowed comments through – nothing else. So it can’t be that effective surely? Do you have any experience of this on your blog?

Apple’s stock is at an all time high at the minute, can this continue? If it can, you might be well advised to follow Kyle Conroy’s advice!

Kyle’s post suggests that if rather than buying that shiny new Apple MacBook G3 250 back in 1997 for $5700 (ouch!!), you’d bought $5700 worth of Apple shares then today you would $330,000 better off!

It’s not really surprising given where Apple are today I guess, but does beg the question – could you do the same today with Apple? The fact that an iPod Touch (3G / Late 2009) was $199 in 2009 and would now have shares worth $315 suggests you might (particularly as that’s only a few months ago!).

Or, on the other hand should you be looking for more companies that will replicate what Apple have done?

You may have read recently about comparing of battery sizes, capacities and the like when I was looking for a rechargeable battery pack for my phone, I took the advice of @ZuuMediaSwindon and bought the PINES Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack

I’ve now had a chance to use it in anger and at least five people have asked what it is and where I got it from, so here it is!

Boxed:

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack - Boxed

It comes with an array of manuals and handy, carry case (about the size of an old style Nintendo DS):

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack, Carry case and Manuals

Opening it up, for charging the battery you have:

1. A mains charger
2. A car charger
3. A USB charger

And charging “tips” for such a variety of things I can’t even imagine what some of them are for!

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack - Carry case contents

PINES Rechargeable Battery Pack - Pack contents

And finally here it is charging my Motorola Milestone/DROID (which I get a days charge out of at the most!)

PINES Rechargeable Batter Pack - Charging the Milestone / DROID

So, it’s had quite a few outings now and it’s been great for a top up charge whenever I’ve needed one (I just carry the USB tip that fits both of our phones and the iPod tip). It did drain itself quite heavily overnight the other night as I left it plugged into my phone. I’m not sure that my phone wasn’t charging, running down a little bit on the data network and then charging again throughout the night though!

All that said it’s a fantastic purchase for anyone who has a couple of USB devices, it’s £34.90 on Amazon at the moment:
PINES Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack

Two posts on the same day and both techie – don’t be put off, normal ranty service may well be resumed soon…

I’ve used my Windows Mobile in the past as a tethered modem for me eee pc when out and about without WiFi or o2 mobile broadband, it’s not always been easy but has been handy to have around!

I reinstalled my eee today, and was looking around for how I’m going to achieve this same functionality with the Milestone on Android, almost everything screamed “root your device” at me. I’m not a fan of rooting it for a lot of reasons the biggest being I don’t want to brick the device – so that’s a non-starter.

Then I spotted a handy guide from linux magazine on Tethering Android, it didn’t work straight off which was a little disappointing. So a little more digging on the Android forums, produced some additional instructions. I’m producing them here for my own benefit as well as yours – as I’m bound to forget.

1. Install “Proxoid” app from Marketplace.
   
   
2. Turn on USB debugging mode on your phone:
   
   Settings – > Application -> Development -> Enable USB Debugging
   
   
3. On your Ubuntu machine create a 90-android.rules file:
   
   gksudo gedit /etc/udev/rules.d/90-android.rules
   
   
4. Add the following to it (note this is the difference from the linux magazine tutorial):
   
   
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c01", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0bb4", ATTRS{idProduct} =="0c02", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="22b8", ATTRS{idProduct} =="41db", MODE="0666", OWNER="*insertyourusername"

   * insert your username as appropriate!
   
   
5. Download and unpack the latest release of the Android SDK: http://developer.android.com/sdk/
   
   
6. Connect the phone to the Ubuntu machine with your USB cable and start Proxoid on the phone.
   
   
7. Open a Terminal, navigate to the tools directory in the Android SDK folder and run the following command:
   ./adb forward tcp:8080 tcp:8080
   
   

The proxy server should now be running, but to be able to use it with Firefox, you have to modify the browser’s proxy settings:

1. In Firefox, choose Edit -> Preferences and switch to the Advanced -> Network section.
   
   
2. Press the Settings button in the Configure how Firefox connects to the Internet group.
   
   
3. Select the Manual proxy configuration option, then enter localhost in the HTTP Proxy field and 8080 in the Port field. Press OK to save the settings and close the window.
   
   

Now you can browse the Web using the created connection.

Given that I’ll need to remember how to do this, when I don’t have a connection. Here’s a handy PDF with the above guide to tethering android to put on your android device!!

I know I haven’t posted in a while – but I’ve had lots going on…. Then my first post back is a techie one, I apologise (well for some of you I do anyway!).

I want a backup battery for my Motorola Droid/Milestone, I’ve already got one for my iPod Touch and it’s invaluable – but I figure if I get one with a straight USB out it can charge almost any of my devices with the right cable! This makes far more sense to me, so today I went hunting. Would you believe how hard these things are to find?

I’ve been offered rechargable batteries, battery chargers, spare batteries for the phone all sorts of things – none of which were quite what I wanted, I think this boils down to not knowing what to search for – generally most of what I found was listed as:

“Rechargeable Backup Battery Pack USB”

I’ve found to, one by an unknown manufacturer (PINES) and one by Kensington, so I start doing a little comparison on them, the features I need are:

• Small
• Light
• Capacity

Shouldn’t be that hard really, nobody can play with dimensions or weight (although there will probably be trade-offs for capacity!) but they’re pretty much standard:

Almost sold then, Kensington tell me lots of information about their pack and it’s 7wH capacity, compared to Pines 4800mAh?
Wait a minute…. Are we comparing apples with apples and beans with beans here?

What are wH and how do we convert them to mAH?

I found a useful link on camerahacker with conversions, so let’s crunch the numbers.. It’s probably easier to convert the Pines product so it is also in wH

watt = amp * volt

So,

Wh = 4.8Ah * 5.5VDC (Note we've converted the mAh to Ah by dividing it by 1000)
Wh = 26.4

Compared to the Kensington device – that’s huge! 26.4Wh vs 7Wh (and it’s cheaper!)…
Have I got something wrong here?